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The NRA turns 150: The organization has a rich history. Most of it has been buried.

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On Nov. 17, 1871, the National Rifle Association was chartered in New York using the address of the Army and Navy Journal in lower Manhattan. Its publisher and editor, William Conant Church, had been a New York Times special correspondent during the Civil War. Once slightly wounded, he reported under the pseudonym Pierrepont, the name of a street in Brooklyn where he lived. Church later became a Union brevet officer in charge of the militia organized to defend Washington, D.C. in case of a Confederate invasion.

Church co-founded the NRA with another Brooklynite and Civil War veteran, George Wood Wingate. He was a New York national guardsman who was promoted amid fighting in Carlisle near the battle of Gettysburg. Wingate would go on to become the NRA’s master rifle trainer. Within six years of the NRA being founded, American riflemen would become the undisputed champions of the (English-speaking) world. They beat first the Irish and then the British-led Imperial Team on the NRA’s range called Creedmoor in Queens County on Long Island.

Church and Wingate had followed how Prussia in Europe had prevailed against two larger empires, Austria and France, using both better rifles and riflemen. They founded the NRA six years after the Civil War ended as a private initiative, during the peak of Reconstruction, to train soldiers in better riflery in anticipation of future wars. They began by training New York guardsmen at Creedmoor range using state funds introduced by their Brooklyn representative in Albany.

Wingate traveled to London as a lawyer and there toured the Wimbledon range of the National Rifle Association of the United Kingdom. After granting it a Royal charter, Queen Victoria herself fired its inaugural shot. The NRA in New York copied the British Royal NRA’s name, the distances to its targets on Wimbledon range, and even their solid iron designs weighing up to 400 pounds each – shipped by steamer across the Atlantic.

Few NRA members today know this history. Why not? It’s as if their leaders have buried the NRA’s past. New leaders took over the group in 1977, when they “shifted” the NRA on a new, “unyielding” course for gun rights. Today’s embattled CEO, Wayne LaPierre, joined them a year later as a junior lobbyist. Later, during President Obama’s years, he and other leaders rolled out a new origin story claiming the NRA was founded in support of the Second Amendment and is “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization.” This claim is untrue.

A shift in history

The leaders of the “Cincinnati Revolt,” as the shift was called, incorporated into the effort affiliated gun clubs across the nation that the NRA had built up over more than a century. To further it, they buried the NRA’s Brooklyn and British roots and founding mission of better marksmanship. And how its leaders since Prohibition had come, until 1977, to weigh gun ownership against public safety to support what they called “reasonable” gun control.

During President Trump’s years, NRA leaders added a second claim about Reconstruction. “When faced with the threats, coercion, intimidation, and yes, violence of an organization called the Ku Klux Klan, it was the NRA that stood with and defended the rights of blacks to the Second Amendment,” wrote Allen West, an NRA board member, in 2018 for Conservative News Service. A year later, he repeated the same claim as LaPierre applauded on the dais before NRA members in Indianapolis. At the same meeting, West, now running for governor of Texas, joined other NRA board members Ted Nugent and then-President Oliver North in accusing LaPierre of embezzlement.

Not a word about arming freed slaves is true. In 1877, the same year that Reconstruction ended, Church publicly complained that the NRA, despite its global, Victorian-era triumphs, had yet to expand rifle training beyond New York and so was still not improving riflery nationwide. The longest trip taken by the NRA during Reconstruction was by steamer to Dublin to win a rematch against the Irish at their Dollymount range.

Church wrote a lengthy history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and he made no mention of anyone helping to arm freed slaves, and no reference to the NRA at all. Even as he noted that “Negroes were killed in large numbers throughout the South without even an attempt to hold any one responsible for their murder.”

Scarce transparency

By burying so much NRA history, its modern leaders have buried the legacies of generations of war heroes. Most NRA leaders, until 1977, were decorated veterans like Milton A. Reckord. Medaled in both world wars, he was the NRA’s longest-serving leader until LaPierre. Reckord cleaned up an embezzlement scandal in 1925, when he also began a practice of publishing the NRA’s annual financial reports. This transparency stopped in 1977.

Their successors led by LaPierre have forgotten more history. Wingate was also a co-founder of the New York Public Schools Athletic League. Today the top senior boy as well as girl athlete in every sport across the five boroughs of New York City still receives the Wingate Award. He led New York public schools to start offering sports to girls in 1905.

Church was the first figure on record to exhort the military to disallow use of the n-word and d-word for African Americans and Italian Americans, respectively, writing by the early 1890s that undermined morale – over 50 years before the military integrated Black soldiers with others.

NRA leaders have noted some of the NRA’s history, like its members’ role in organizing shipments of rifles and gear to the British Home Guard before America’s entry into World War II. But they’ve rarely said much else. This might help explain why they’ve said so little about it even on the NRA’s sesquicentennial.

Frank Smyth is the author of The NRA: The Unauthorized History.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The NRA is 150 years old: A look at how the organization has evolved

Yahoo posted a free version of the same article.

Five myths about the National Rifle Association: No, the NRA did not start out as a civil rights organization.

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“Never is the Second Amendment more important than during public unrest,” a National Rifle Association video claimed in March. Rhetoric about owning, wielding and using guns has grown especially heated in recent weeks. In response to protests against police brutality, President Trump tweeted, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” echoing a Miami police chief from the 1960s — and an NRA article published after the Los Angeles riots in 1992. “You loot — we shoot,” wrote Marion Hammer, the organization’s first female president. Meanwhile, armed protests against state health measures, such as those that shut down the Michigan Legislature last month, seem rooted in an ideology promoted by the modern NRA: that only firearms in civilian hands can safeguard the nation from government overreach. Here are five myths about the group’s mission and history — some told by critics, others told by the NRA itself.

Myth No. 1

The early NRA was involved with the Ku Klux Klan.

Michael Moore, in his 2002 documentary “Bowling for Columbine,” insinuated that the NRA and the KKK were linked, because they were formed six years apart. The New Republic drew a similar connection in a 2013 article on the history of gun control. In a recent review of my book (which reported no ties between the organizations), the New York Times wrote that the NRA “came to the rescue of Southern members of the K.K.K.,” before issuing a correction.

Documents from the era, including an exhaustive tome by NRA co-founder William Conant Church, show that this isn’t true. The early NRA, founded at the peak of Reconstruction in 1871, never went much farther than its shooting range outside Manhattan, and played no role in the South during Reconstruction or for years thereafter. Church and other early NRA leaders, nearly all of whom were veteran Union officers, unequivocally supported President Ulysses S. Grant’s efforts to crush the Klan.

But, contrary to claims by NRA board director Allen West, who has said that the group “stood with freed slaves to make sure they had their Second Amendment rights,” the organization didn’t play a major role in opposing white supremacists, either. The NRA was so provincial at the time that, in 1877, Church had to remind the board that New York City and its environs “are only a part of the great rifle movement in America.”

Myth No. 2

The NRA originated as a champion of gun rights.

The group calls itself “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization,” a claim constantly repeated by its leaders and lawyers, and by media outlets including NPR.

But the NRA did not raise gun rights at all over the first half-century of its existence. It focused instead on improving marksmanship in anticipation of future wars. In 1922, an editorial in the NRA’s first official journal flagged gun rights as an area of concern for the first time, citing both a 1911 New York law and Russia’s recent outlawing of civilian ownership of guns. The Second Amendment came up only as the Cold War set in: The NRA first asserted what it called “the Second Article of the Bill of Rights,” along with the “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” in a 1952 American Rifleman editorial.

In 1977, the NRA finally embraced gun rights as its “unyielding” aim, in the words of its leader Harlon B. Carter. At that year’s national convention, Carter, a former Border Patrol chief, led the “Cincinnati Revolt,” an internal rebellion that transformed the NRA into the nation’s largest gun rights organization.

Myth No. 3

Armed Black Panthers led the NRA to support gun control.

“When Black Folks Armed Themselves The NRA And Republicans Suddenly Supported Gun Control,” read a headline on NewsOne. “Back in the 1960s, even the NRA supported gun control” when it came to disarming the Black Panthers, says the History Channel. Indeed, in 1967, mere months after a group of Black Panthers entered the California State Capitol with long guns and holstered sidearms, Gov. Ronald Reagan signed a law banning the open carry of firearms. The NRA helped write that legislation and monitored its passage in American Rifleman without comment; race no doubt influenced the bill.

But this event was not a turning point for the NRA. By the 1960s, it had disavowed the “private armies” of white supremacists that arose during the civil rights era, and it broadly supported greater regulation of firearms, such as those tied to recent political assassinations. “The NRA does not advocate an ‘ostrich’ attitude toward firearms legislation,” said its chief executive, Franklin L. Orth, three weeks before the Black Panthers protested at the California capitol. “We recognize that the dynamism and complexities of modern society create new problems which demand new solutions.” The following year, the NRA supported a federal law banning, among other things, mail-order guns, adding to a 1934 NRA-backed law sharply restricting “machine guns.”

Myth No. 4

The NRA is just an extension of the gun industry.

People often declare that the group is a mere “front for gun makers,” as one HuffPost article put it. It’s true that the NRA was born at the gun industry’s hip: All seven editions of the “Manual for Rifle Practice,” by co-founder George Wood Wingate, were packed with firearms ads. Today, large donations from gun manufacturers make up a substantial portion of the NRA’s revenue, as membership dues have declined.

But the NRA has still operated relatively autonomously over the past 149 years. In 1937, its leadership even labeled a new, powerful Magnum revolver by Smith & Wesson a “ ‘freak’ class of weapon” that should be restricted to police.

More important, the modern NRA is a political force in its own right, commanding outsize influence that can’t fully be explained by the deep pockets of the companies that fund it. Since 1977, when the group started to back the notion that civilians are entitled to nearly the same level of firepower as police, it has helped to roll back federal gun laws it once supported and to block almost all new federal regulations, while working to expand concealed-carry laws in most states.

Though money is important to its operations, “the real source of its power, I believe, comes from voters,” law professor Adam Winkler told the Guardian. In recent elections, especially primary contests, the NRA has mobilized voters at every level, attacking opponents and rewarding “pro-gun” candidates. That electoral following helped chief executive Wayne LaPierre persuade President Trump last summer to reverse himself on expanding background checks.

Myth No. 5

The NRA isn’t threatened by its current troubles.

The NRA is in turmoil. A 2019 tax investigation by the New York attorney general prompted a billing dispute between the group and the advertising firm Ackerman McQueen, its chief vendor and longtime communications partner. What ensued was a crossfire of charges of financial improprieties, pitching LaPierre against the group’s president, Oliver North, who eventually stepped down. Its top lobbyist was forced out. Several board members resigned. Still, members insist that the organization’s leadership remains strong. “It’s going to take a big revolt to get them out of power,” John Crump, an NRA member and firearms instructor, told the Chicago Tribune. The NRA has endured “these sorts of internal discussions, debates, and changes without losing a step,” board director J. Kenneth Blackwell said in the Washington Times.

The NRA also faces significant financial issues. Already in debt from the more than $30 million it spent on Trump and other candidates in 2016, its recent legal troubles have cost an additional $100 million, according to secret recordings obtained by NPR this year. “To survive,” LaPierre said, he took the group “down to the studs,” laying off dozens of people and cutting the pay of others. Meanwhile, the New York authorities continue to investigate whether the NRA illegally diverted funds from its tax-exempt foundation, threatening the organization’s nonprofit status. This combination of internal and external pressures presents LaPierre with the biggest crisis of his career — and the NRA as a whole with its worst crisis since the Cincinnati Revolt.

The unsung war heroes of the National Rifle Association

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The original article is here.

The National Rifle Association of America has a long, exquisite history of service to the nation. Many of its leaders from past generations were war heroes. But their legacies, largely for political reasons, are barely known today.

The NRA was founded in 1871 by veteran Union officers in New York City six years after the Civil War. They knew that both better rifles and marksmanship had tipped the balance in favor of recent European wars. Their aim was to improve riflery at home in anticipation of future wars.

NRA co-founder William Conant Church had been a journalist, once slightly wounded during the Civil War Battle of Williamsburg in Virginia. He later became an Army brevet lieutenant colonel. The other NRA co-founder, George Wood Wingate, who retired as a general in the New York National Guard, was promoted to sergeant during fighting in Carlisle, Pa., during the nearby Battle of Gettysburg.

Wingate later wrote the Manual of Rifle Practice, and his training regimen was adopted by most branches of military service and state national guards. Church published his rifle manual in his Army and Navy Journal and Gazette of the Regular and Volunteer Forces, the first of its kind later renamed Armed Forces Journal. In its pages, Church also became the first to advocate that the military remove two racial epithets — one that disparages blacks and one that disparages Italians — from its vocabulary, doing so a half century before the military finally integrated its forces.

James A. Drain led the NRA after the turn of the 20th century. By then he had lost his right hand in a hunting accident. But he still later served in World War I as a lieutenant colonel leading an ordnance corps in France. He later helped design and deploy the tanks credited with having helped defeat the Central Powers, earning him the Army Distinguished Service Medal.

Milton A. Reckord was, until recently, the longest serving chief executive of the NRA. Reckord served in the Mexican Expedition. During World War I, he led troops in the Battle of Meuse-Argonne in the final Allied offensive, for which France bestowed upon him the Croix de Guerre with Palm and his own nation awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal. In World War II, he first trained recruits and then became the Provost Marshal for Europe in charge of enemy prisoners of war, earning the Distinguished Service Medal with a bronze oak leaf cluster, and the Bronze Star.

The NRA has honored other war heroes among the NRA’s past leadership like the late World War II Marine fighter pilot Joe Foss. A longtime NRA board director and former commissioner of the American Football League, Foss received the Medal of Honor for his aerial combat role in the Battle of Guadalcanal. But Foss, unlike many other war heroes, joined the NRA board after the organization’s “shift” to prioritize gun rights, as one former NRA president put it, in 1977 in what is still known in the lore as the “Cincinnati Revolt.”

Three years before, in 1974, Reckord, at 94, was interviewed by NRA officials in his home for an NRA oral history. In it, he described how a law that he and the NRA supported during the Tommy Gun days of Prohibition that outlawed automatic firearms (still on the books) was “sane, reasonable and effective.” The NRA oral history was never published.

Merritt A. Edson led the NRA through the late 1950s. He became known as “Red Mike” back when he was commanding a Marine expeditionary detachment in the late 1920s in Nicaragua, where he earned the Navy Cross. He later earned the Medal of Honor for leading the defense of “Edson’s Ridge,” overlooking an airfield, in the Battle of Guadalcanal. Edson’s other honors included two Legion of Merit decorations, a Presidential Unit Citation with two bronze stars, and, from the United Kingdom, the Distinguished Service Order.

Franklin L. Orth led the NRA through the 1960s. He entered World War II as a captain in the infantry who “served on extra-hazardous duty in long-range penetrations behind the Japanese lines in Burma.” Orth later served in the Eisenhower administration as deputy assistant secretary of the Army, and as president of the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Orth’s legacy, however, is also largely forgotten. “The NRA does not advocate an ‘ostrich’ attitude toward firearms legislation,” said Orth in 1967, one year before the NRA supported the Gun Control Act of 1968. “We recognize that the dynamism and complexities of modern society create new problems which demand new solutions.” It was this federal gun law that radicalized the NRA along with others who formed the nation’s gun rights movement in the 1970s.

Since then, the NRA’s new leaders have focused more on the future than the past. Politics is never a good reason, however, to keep the legacies of any war heroes in the dark.

Frank Smyth is author of “The NRA: The Unauthorized History.”

The Early NRA Had Nothing to Do with the KKK: Neo-Nazis and others only got closer later.

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The protesters who recently carried semi-automatic rifles into capitol buildings in different states were hardly the first to do so. Back in May 1967, a group of Black Panthers led by Bobby Seale in Sacramento carried firearms into the California state house. Within less than three months, Governor Ronald Reagan signed a law banning the open carry of weapons in the state.

This swift change in California law showed the role of race in gun politics, and the National Rifle Association (NRA), back then, quietly supported its passage. But the era was also a time—long since forgotten—when the NRA favored gun control. A year later, the NRA supported a federal law banning mail-order guns like the one tied to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, among other measures. The law ended up both radicalizing the NRA and giving rise to the gun rights movement that is active today.

The role that race has played in the NRA is actually different from what many people may think. There was no evidence of any ties between the NRA, founded in 1871, and any white power groups for more than a hundred years, and it has only been in recent decades that such groups have moved closer to the NRA, despite its leaders’ efforts to keep their distance.

The NRA began hiring minorities in the mid-1970s, when a black attorney, Peter S. Ridley, who had earned a Bronze Star in Vietnam, joined its lobbying wing. The Washington College of Law at American University still has an award for African-American students demonstrating leadership qualities in his name.

A few figures have peddled misleading myths. Michael Moore in his 2002 film, Bowling for Columbine, insinuated that the NRA and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) might be linked since they both were founded after the Civil War, six years apart. But nothing could be further from the truth. The NRA was founded by veteran Union officers, who rarely ventured much further south than their shooting range on Long Island. They supported President Ulysses S. Grant’s efforts to crush the KKK during Reconstruction.

The NRA itself recently peddled the opposite myth. Last year, Allen West, an NRA board member, Army veteran, and former Florida congressman, told NRA members in Indianapolis, “Know the history. The NRA, this organization, stood with freed slaves to make sure they had their Second Amendment rights.” This claim, however, is equally unfounded, as the writings from the period—including one by NRA co-founder William Conant Church—undeniably show.

A former war correspondent, editor, publisher, and writer, Church was also aware of, and sympathetic to, the plight of freed slaves. “The negroes had ceased to be slaves, but they had not yet become free men, and there was no [guarantee] that they might not be subjected to some new form of oppression,” he wrote in his 500-page tome on Grant’s policies in the South. “Negroes were killed in large numbers throughout the South without even an attempt to hold anyone responsible for their murder.”

A product of his age, Church resorted to a racial stereotype for freed slaves by singularizing them as “Sambo” in one piece about their electoral potential. But he still stands out as the earliest figure on record to advocate that the military remove the racial epithets of “nigger” and “dago” from its vocabulary, more than fifty years before it finally integrated troops.

By 1957, however, shortly after the start of the civil rights era, there was a case involving the NRA and the KKK. A returning black veteran named Robert F. Williams organized a group in Monroe, North Carolina, that received a local charter from the NRA. It eventually was attacked by the local KKK in a firefight that made press as far north as Norfolk, Virginia. But the NRA, not far away in Washington, D.C., neither did nor said anything to help its first black chapter.

Another black armed group, Deacons for Defense and Justice, was formed in 1964 in Jonesboro, Louisiana. The NRA sold to this group, as it did with others, surplus military ammunition available to the NRA through a government program. The same year, white power groups like Minutemen and Rangers appeared in a number of states. Nationally syndicated columnist Inez Robb, a former war correspondent, called these groups “private armies of the extreme right.”

Fearing they could possibly spoil their own image, the entire leadership of the NRA in 1964 said the “NRA vehemently disavows” any link to any “private armies or group violence,” making a statement that sounds nothing like what NRA leaders say today.

In 1977, the NRA finally embraced gun rights as its “unyielding” aim, shifting the life arc of the association. Following the lead, in fact, of two other groups, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and Gun Owners of America, which were formed in opposition to the federal Gun Control Act of 1968 that had been backed by the NRA. It was only after all three of these groups embraced gun rights that white power paramilitaries gravitated to their coalition.

NRA leaders have tried to keep their distance from violent extremists. In 1992, a botched, fatal federal raid on a family of white separatists over two illegal, sawed-off shotguns in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, galvanized white power paramilitaries along with other gun rights activists. The NRA’s American Rifleman magazine waited a year, however, before even mentioning the raid, and the organization’s CEO Wayne LaPierre waited even longer, knowing the group would lose political clout if it was perceived as being allied with extremists.

In 1995, one month after the Oklahoma City bombing, members of the National Alliance, the nation’s then-largest neo-Nazi organization, whose literature inspired the bomber, quietly passed out trifold fliers on the floor of the NRA convention in Phoenix. “There is hardly a more significant difference than that which exists between the people who want gun control and those who don’t,” read the pamphlet, concluding, “The day for a great cleansing of this land will come.”

NRA leaders did not dispute that Nazis were in the room. “People have passed out literature, they could pass out literature for the communists. It doesn’t mean we support communism,” NRA chief lobbyist Tanya Metaksa told me for an article in The Village Voice.

At the same meeting, LaPierre addressed anyone on the floor “who supports—or even fantasizes about—terrorism [or] insurrection,” saying there is “a difference between 3.5 million united NRA members, and some scattered band of paranoid hatemongers,” telling them, “if someone in this room doesn’t know the difference, then there’s the door!”

White supremacist paramilitaries reappeared during President Donald Trump’s first year in office in Charlottesville, Virginia, mounting a larger presence than seen for decades. The year before, NRA board member Ted Nugent had posted a meme on Facebook accusing prominent Jewish leaders of being Nazis for supporting gun control, which the Anti-Defamation League called anti-Semitic.

In 2018, after the mass shooting at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, LaPierre addressed the Conservative Political Action Committee annual conference, singling out Jewish philanthropists for backing gun control. Two writers at the Israeli liberal newspaper Haaretz called his remarks anti-Semitic as well.

The NRA of today, unlike the organization of more than fifty years ago, has not denounced any armed groups among the recent protestors, despite the presence of Confederate flags and even a few Nazi symbols. Much like the President and his advisors, NRA leaders know these extremists comprise a loyal part of their coalition.

Frank Smyth is the author of the new book The NRA: The Unauthorized History (Flatiron Books).